Justin Fishner-Wolfson - Secondary Investing in Private Markets - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 227]
What this covers
Justin Fishner-Wolfson founded 137 Ventures, a venture capital fund that provides liquidity solutions to founders, investors, and employees holding illiquid stakes in private companies. In conversation with Patrick, Fishner-Wolfson traces the origins of this focus to concrete human problems: early employees at Facebook around 2010 accumulated enormous paper wealth through equity grants but remained cash-poor, unable to afford basic life transitions like moving out from shared housing as they married or started families. That same year, a Goldman Sachs round valued Facebook at $50 billion while these employees remained locked into their illiquid positions—a gap between nominal net worth and spendable cash that motivated Fishner-Wolfson to build a firm addressing it.
The conversation moves through the mechanics and scale of secondary equity markets in the tech sector, explaining how these transactions work and comparing valuations in secondary rounds against primary fundraising. Fishner-Wolfson then broadens into his investment philosophy, discussing what constitutes defensibility and competitive advantage in private companies, drawing lessons from Palantir and SpaceX. The discussion touches on counter-positioning and inversion as strategic frameworks, the role of information asymmetry between public and private markets, and how reducing that asymmetry might improve capital allocation. Throughout, he examines specific business models in his portfolio, what makes certain founders and entrepreneurs distinctive, and his views on which valuations and business structures seem disconnected from reality in the current environment.
Fishner-Wolfson argues that providing liquidity solutions in private secondary markets addresses a real need created when employees and founders hold illiquid paper wealth without cash, which is the founding rationale for 137 Ventures.
- Early Facebook employees held large paper wealth but no liquid cash
- The 2010 Goldman Sachs round valued Facebook at $50 billion while employees stayed cash-poor
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Early Facebook employees around 2010 held substantial wealth on paper through stock ownership but had essentially no liquid cash, creating real-life pressures (wanting to stop living with roommates as they married or had children) that revealed a need for liquidity solutions in private markets.
“I have a lot of friends who had all this wealth on paper. They owned all this stock and literally no money.”
137 Ventures is a venture capital fund focused on providing liquidity solutions to founders, investors, and employees of private businesses.
“founder of 137 Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on providing liquidity solutions to founders, investors, and employees of private businesses”
In 2010, a Goldman Sachs round valued Facebook at $50 billion while it was still a private company.
“If you kind of roll the clock back to 2010, there was that Goldman Sachs rounded value of the company at 50 billion.”